Sydney Anglican Archbishop Glenn Davies. ‘His office would not tell the Guardian where he stands on homosexuality,’ writes David Marr.
Photograph: David Moir/AAP

Where is George Pell when the no case needs him? The vote is tanking. Ahead lies a last-ditch battle in Canberra to safeguard the power of the churches. So much is at stake but the warrior cardinal is out of the picture.

It’s a pity. His presence might have made this a more honest contest. Pell has never flinched from voicing what he calls “the hard things of Christ” and near the head of the list for hardliners like him is contempt for homosexuality.

Yet that’s been kept under wraps in the equal marriage debate. Sin and damnation have figured little in the arguments of the last months. The deliberate strategy of the no campaigners has been to muffle their profound hostility to the LGBTQI whose lives are in question here.

It’s only a gambit. Nothing has changed. In the eyes of these warriors, my lot are still bound for hell. They just don’t want to say so right now.

This is a strategy for the times, a strategic silence imposed in the hope of winning the ballot (that’s not looking good) and then positioning the churches to seize what advantages they can in coming brawls over the new marriage laws.

So the cleric warriors are talking marriage and freedom. They’re not writing to the papers about God’s grim verdict on men who lie with men. They’re not at the Press Club telling Australians about the damnation that waits those who fall prey to forbidden desires.

The veteran gayrightscampaigner Rodney Croome is pleased opponents of equal marriage don’t reckon it’s in their best interests these days to be openly nasty about homosexuals. “That’s a step.”

Instead, they’re executing what he calls a theological dance. “They are putting forward a positive vision of the universe based on the idea of a divinely ordained complementarity between the sexes into which homosexuality doesn’t fit and same-sex marriage fundamentally threatens.”

Croome rates this strategy new, smart and made in America. “It has no roots here. I have never seen this as part of a gay rights debate in Australia before.”

The determination of Christian warriors to stick to the script is comic. Lyle Shelton, head of the Australian Christian Lobby and the face of the no campaign, refused to tell the Guardian where he stands on homosexuality.

Approve or disapprove? Sin or not sin? Disgusting? Reprehensible? He would rather not say right now.

He assured the Guardian the fight is all about freedom: “Our advocacy for a no vote in this campaign is not about coercing others to conform to a Christian worldview but to ensure that Christians themselves are permitted to hold one.”

Faced with the same question by the Fairfax press earlier this year Shelton pivoted the other way: “Any expression of sexuality outside of marriage between a man and a woman is seen as a prohibited expression of human sexuality.”

And here looms a mighty problem for warriors of the faith: if equal marriage becomes law, God’s plain marker will disappear. It’s reason enough to fight equal marriage with every last breath.

But the strategy is to soft-pedal Sodom.

Christians in the west have been walking away from traditional hatred of homosexuality for 50 years. The church has seen struggles like this before to discard beliefs. They are long and hard. But once again most believers have ditched superstition and accepted the science.

But in August, Shelton brought a dozen faiths and factions of faiths together in the Coalition for Marriage to fight reform. They were an odd bunch from very different traditions with not much in common but this: a deep commitment to the old hatred of homosexuality.

It’s always been a great ecumenical cause.

The members of the Coalition range from minnows to mighty faiths, from new Pentecostals to the ancient Greek Orthodox Church. But the Coalition wouldn’t amount to much without a couple of heavy hitters: the Catholic and Anglican dioceses of Australia’s sin city, Sydney.

The Sydney Anglicans threatened to split the worldwide church a decade or so ago when Episcopalians (as they are known in America) began consecrating gay bishops. “This dispute is not really about homosexuality,” Archbishop Peter Jensen assured me at the time. “It’s really about authority and who runs the church. And fairly clearly, to most of the rest of us, God runs the church through the Bible.”

So, no poofters.

Under the present archbishop, Glenn Davies, the Sydney diocese is a “lead partner” in Shelton’s Coalition and the other day gave a million dollars to the no campaign. “Brothers and sisters,” Davies told his synod, “the stakes are high and the cost is high. Yet the cause is just.”

The gift shocked Anglicans across the country. Explaining himself afterwards, Davies spoke of Christians keen to engage graciously with the world but finding themselves caught up in an already difficult campaign, “exacerbated by the way in which the debate has been framed, implying that anyone who opposes a yes vote is a hater and a homophobe.”

Hard markers might place Archbishop Davies in their company.

His office would also not tell the Guardian where he stands on homosexuality. We were given instead a lecture by another senior Sydney cleric as our guide. Its rhetoric of love and acceptance is silky soft. But its conclusion is uncompromisingly hard: gay men and women must never have sex with their own kind.

Forget marriage. Sydney Anglicans are talking no sex for life. “For many, this is a struggle and a frustration. It is one of the many painful consequences of living in a broken and fallen world … ”

Is that bigotry, hatred or simply cruel?

It’s certainly the most fundamental argument of the clerical opponents of equal marriage. All of them come to the same point: no sex ever for gays and lesbians. In a truthful contest that demand should have been a prime focus of debate.

Both sides must share the blame here. There was a fear in the yes camp that exposing the theological machinery behind their opponents’ case would look a little ridiculous. Perhaps obsessed.

The Christian Reformed Churches of Australia declare: “Homosexuality is a condition of disordered sexuality that reflects the brokenness of our sinful world … Homosexualism (that is, explicit homosexual practice), however, is incompatible with obedience to the will of God as revealed in Scripture.”

But they are minnows. The Uniting Churchis the third biggest denomination in Australia. But it has officially sidelined itself in the marriage debate while it wrestles, among other things, with a superbly organised anti-gay faction in its ranks called the ACC, the Assembly of Confessing Congregations.

Rome’s official language is pitiless. The catechism condemns homosexual acts as 'grave depravity'

The ACC is a member of the Coalition for Marriage. Among its leaders is Walter Abetz, brother of the Tasmanian senator. Though fighting on a number of fronts to rescue the church from error, its main focus is hostility to gays and lesbians in Uniting ranks. It’s determined to block equal marriage.

Last year the ACC declared homosexuals not to be, as we usually understand the term, human: “The sanctioning of homosexual relationships countenances another species of human being which is contrary to God’s word … ”

Three Catholic dioceses have joined the Coalition for Marriage: Hobart, Broken Bay and the mighty Archdiocese of Sydney led by its deliberately controversial archbishop Anthony Fisher, the pick of his predecessor, Cardinal Pell. Fisher’s homilies win headlines. He has directly instructed his flock to vote no.

So where does he stand on homosexuality? His office pointed us to the catechism of the church. In all fairness we thought we should double-check with His Grace to see if he shares any of the reservations voiced by fellow bishops about the language of that document.

Apparently not. We heard nothing back.

Rome’s official language is pitiless. The catechism condemns homosexual acts as “grave depravity … intrinsically disordered … contrary to the natural law… under no circumstances can they be approved.”

And the only proper response? You guessed it: no sex for life. “Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.”

Among Australian Catholics, disquiet about the language of the catechism is nearly universal. It’s hardly ever voiced in pulpits. Few Catholic schools pay it more than brisk lip service. The pastoral side of the church – schools, hospitals and charities – dumped this teaching long ago.

Most of the bishops – even very conservative men – are staying out of the line of fire in the marriage debate. They have pointedly declined to take their dioceses into the Coalition for Marriage. Bishops in Perth and Parramatta have offered apologies to the LGBTI community for past wrongs and urged their flocks to follow their consciences.

That’s code for vote yes.

So Fisher is left to lead a rump. And he has kept his profound distaste for homosexuality out of his homilies attacking the idea of letting them marry one another. He is staying stumm for the moment on all that while pushing God’s vision for marriage and the fear of those looming – but never quite specified – threats to church freedom.

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There’s a clue in the catechism to what those “freedoms” might be. It nestles in sweet rhetoric where Catholics are directed to accept homosexuals “with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”

So what just discrimination does the church wants to exercise? We asked the archbishop for a brief list. Again we were disappointed. No reply. Surely they have a list somewhere? It seems Australians will be told what freedoms the rest of us are expected to give up for the church only when the votes have been counted.

Over the last 30 years Croome has watched opponents of gay rights change tack many times. But he thinks nothing has really changed. “The same preoccupations we faced in Tasmania – over school curriculums, religious persecution and the destruction of family values – reinvent themselves and take on the guise of the times. There is nothing new in the deep prejudices here.”

But those old hatreds are muffled. The theological machinery remains out of sight. The no case is losing yet defined the ground of the debate. And the voting is almost over. It’s a miracle.